Susan Choi’s fifth novel, Flashlight, emerges like its titular object—a beam cutting through darkness, illuminating fragments while leaving vast territories in shadow. Following her National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise, Choi has crafted a work that is simultaneously more intimate and more expansive, a family saga that ripples outward from a single catastrophic night on a Japanese beach to encompass decades of geopolitical turmoil, personal exile, and the unreliable nature of memory itself.
The novel opens with ten-year-old Louisa washing ashore, barely alive, after a nighttime beach walk with her father Serk goes catastrophically wrong. Her father, an ethnic Korean raised in Japan who cannot swim, has vanished into the dark waters, presumed drowned. But this apparent tragedy is merely the first note in a complex symphony of displacement, disappearance, and the enduring human need to construct meaning from chaos.
A Structure That Mirrors Memory’s Fragments
Choi’s narrative architecture is as carefully constructed as a piece of clockwork, yet it moves with the fluid uncertainty of water itself. The novel unfolds through alternating perspectives—Louisa, Serk, Anne (Louisa’s American mother), and Tobias (Anne’s illegitimate son from a youthful affair)—each section titled simply with the character’s name, like chapters in a family album where the context shifts with each viewing.
This structural choice proves brilliant, as it mirrors the way traumatic memory functions: fragmentary, unreliable, and subject to constant revision. What happened that night on the beach? The answer depends entirely on who is telling the story, and Choi understands that in families fractured by trauma, everyone becomes an unreliable narrator of their own experience.
The temporal shifts are equally sophisticated. We move fluidly between Louisa’s childhood in 1970s Japan, Serk’s boyhood in wartime Korea, Anne’s rebellious youth, and Tobias’s adult quest to understand his fractured family history. Choi never signals these transitions with heavy-handed markers; instead, she trusts her readers to follow the emotional logic that connects past and present.
The Weight of Historical Trauma
Where Flashlight by Susan Choi transcends the boundaries of domestic fiction is in its seamless integration of personal trauma with historical catastrophe. Serk’s story gradually reveals itself as part of the broader tragedy of Korean displacement in twentieth-century Japan. Born to parents who immigrated during the war years, Serk grows up straddling multiple identities—Korean, Japanese, and eventually American—never fully belonging to any.
Choi’s research into the Japanese abduction program by North Korea adds another layer of historical gravity to what initially appears to be a simple drowning. The revelation that Serk has not drowned but has been taken—part of a systematic program of kidnapping Japanese residents for North Korean intelligence purposes—transforms the novel from a family tragedy into something approaching historical epic.
This context never feels imposed or didactic. Instead, Choi weaves the historical material so thoroughly into the fabric of her characters’ lives that we understand how personal trauma and historical trauma are often inseparable. Serk’s disappearance is both a family catastrophe and a small note in a larger symphony of Cold War violence.
The Precision of Language
Choi’s prose demonstrates the kind of precision that comes from absolute confidence in her material. She has the rare ability to write about profound trauma without sentimentality, to create moments of genuine beauty without prettiness. Her descriptions have the clarity of good photography—focused, composed, revealing:
“When the flashlight fell, it landed almost noiselessly in sand. This fact—that the flashlight, in falling, landed almost noiselessly in sand—rippled over her like the pale cloud of light on the ceiling. It was not a memory, as Louisa understood memory: a fragmented, juddering filmstrip of image and sound. This wasn’t something but nothing, an absence where a presence was expected.”
This passage exemplifies Choi’s approach to writing about trauma: she focuses on concrete details—the sound of the flashlight landing, the quality of light on a ceiling—and allows the emotional weight to emerge from these specifics rather than from abstract proclamations of feeling.
Character Development Through Displacement
Each of the four main characters is defined by displacement of one kind or another. Serk, the ethnic Korean raised in Japan who becomes an American academic, never quite belongs anywhere. Anne, estranged from her family after a sexual scandal, creates a new life but never feels entirely legitimate in it. Louisa, the traumatized child who loses her father and grows up feeling perpetually unmoored, and Tobias, the illegitimate son seeking connection to a family that barely acknowledges his existence.
Choi’s genius lies in showing how displacement creates its own forms of intimacy. These characters, all slightly outside the mainstream of their respective cultures, find each other across decades and continents. Tobias’s eventual journey to find the truth about Serk’s disappearance becomes a quest not just for facts but for belonging.
The character of Tobias deserves particular attention. In lesser hands, the illegitimate son arriving to claim his place in the family story could feel contrived. But Choi develops Tobias with such psychological precision—his linguistic gifts, his desperate hunger for connection, his willingness to travel to Japan and eventually Korea in pursuit of answers—that his presence feels inevitable rather than convenient.
The Limits of Truth
Perhaps the novel’s greatest achievement is its sophisticated treatment of truth itself. This is not a mystery that can be solved, despite Tobias’s detective work. Even when we learn what happened to Serk—that he was abducted rather than drowned—the knowledge doesn’t provide the satisfaction we might expect. Truth, Choi suggests, is often less important than the stories we tell ourselves to survive.
Louisa’s recovered memories, Anne’s careful silences, Tobias’s painstaking research—all represent different strategies for approaching the unknowable. The novel’s structure mirrors this epistemological uncertainty: we never get a single, authoritative account of that night on the beach. Instead, we get multiple partial perspectives that together create something like a complete picture, though Choi is too honest to claim completeness is possible.
Minor Criticisms and Considerations
While Flashlight by Susan Choi is largely successful, it occasionally suffers from the weight of its own ambition. The sections dealing with North Korean politics, while historically accurate and thematically relevant, sometimes feel slightly removed from the emotional core of the family story. Choi’s obvious extensive research into the abduction program adds authenticity but occasionally threatens to overwhelm the more intimate human drama.
Additionally, the novel’s commitment to showing rather than telling, while generally a strength, occasionally leaves readers to work harder than necessary to piece together certain plot elements. Some readers may find the temporal shifts and multiple perspectives demanding, though others will appreciate the respect Choi shows for her audience’s intelligence.
The ending, while thematically appropriate, may leave some readers wanting more resolution. But this seems to be Choi’s point: some losses are so profound that resolution is impossible, and the work of living lies not in solving the mystery but in learning to carry the uncertainty.
A Literary Achievement of Substantial Merit
Flashlight confirms Susan Choi’s position as one of our most important contemporary novelists. Following Trust Exercise, another novel concerned with the unreliability of memory and the multiple ways stories can be told, Flashlight demonstrates Choi’s continuing evolution as an artist willing to tackle the most challenging aspects of human experience.
The novel belongs in conversation with other works that examine the intersection of personal and historical trauma—Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko come to mind. But Choi’s particular gift lies in her ability to find the universal in the specific, to locate the mythic dimensions of ordinary family tragedy.
Books for Further Reading
Readers drawn to Flashlight’s exploration of displacement and family trauma should consider:
- Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko – A multigenerational saga of Korean families in Japan
- Lisa Ko’s The Leavers – A meditation on immigration, family separation, and belonging
- Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer – Cold War trauma and divided identity
- Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker – Korean-American identity and the burden of history
- Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean – Contemporary fiction about North Korean defectors
- Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise – Her previous exploration of memory and trauma
Final Verdict
Flashlight by Susan Choi is the kind of novel that lingers in the mind long after reading, its images and questions continuing to resonate. Choi has created a work that honors both the specificity of her characters’ experiences and the universal human struggle to make sense of loss. It’s a novel about the limits of knowledge and the necessity of love, about the stories families tell themselves and the truths they can’t bear to speak.
The book’s exploration of Korean-Japanese-American identity adds crucial voices to contemporary American literature, while its treatment of family trauma speaks to experiences that transcend cultural boundaries. This is literary fiction at its most ambitious and successful—emotionally resonant, historically informed, and formally innovative without being showy.
Flashlight by Susan Choi deserves recognition as one of the year’s most significant literary achievements, a novel that illuminates the darkness we all carry while acknowledging that some shadows are too deep for any light to fully penetrate.
Susan Choi is the author of five novels, including the National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn.
